Chapter 2: Cute tiny wife
Two weeks passed, and the morning Casey got his answer came without warning, the way most things did on the Reyes ranch.
Vivi stood at the stove in her pale yellow sundress, hair tied back with a blue ribbon, flipping pancakes while the windows went gold with early light. She had learned the rhythm of big breakfasts by now. Twelve eggs scrambled soft, a pound of bacon stretched across two pans, coffee strong enough to make Casey's eyes water. Her feet barely reached the floor of her own kitchen if she sat in the wrong chair, so she cooked standing, humming, the thin gold chain at her throat catching the light every time she leaned over a pan.
Johnny came in first, shoulders filling the doorway, hat in one hand. He kissed the top of her head without breaking stride, which required him to bend like a man ducking under a low beam. "Smells like heaven, little one."
"Sit. Almost done."
Casey followed him in, still tugging off his gloves, still talking about a heifer with opinions. Then he stopped. He looked at Vivi. He tilted his head like a bird dog scenting something.
She felt it happen, the heat climbing her neck before she could stop it. Two weeks of practice, ruined in one second.
Casey set his gloves on the table with terrible deliberateness. "Well, I'll be."
"Sit down and eat your breakfast," Vivi said, flipping a pancake with more force than the pancake deserved.
"Mrs. Reyes." He pulled out a chair, sat, laced his fingers. "You're pink. Again. Two weeks later, and you're still pink."
Johnny folded his hands around his coffee mug and watched over the rim, saying nothing, wearing the smallest smile Vivi had ever seen on him.
"I'm standing next to a hot stove," Vivi said.
"Ma'am, I've eaten breakfast at that stove for two years. I know what blushing looks like and I know what steam looks like." Casey leaned forward. "I've been doing the math since Tuesday. Two weeks of you turning red every time I walk in the barn. Two weeks of Johnny humming. Johnny doesn't hum. Johnny hums now."
"Casey." Johnny's voice was mild. It was also a whole conversation.
"I'm not asking anything," Casey said, hands up. "I'm just observing. Out loud. As is my right."
Vivi set the last pancake on the stack and brought the plates over, and she was proud of how steady her hands were. Mostly steady. She put Casey's plate down in front of him and looked him dead in the eye, which for her meant looking up past his freckles at a steep angle.
"Casey Boyd. I fired you once already."
"You did, and Johnny overruled you, which I found deeply satisfying."
"He'll do it again if you keep this up."
Johnny cleared his throat. "Actually I think I'm staying out of it this time."
Both of them looked at him. He took a slow sip of coffee, entirely at peace.
"See," Casey said, "the thing nobody understands about marriage is that the big one always sides with the small one eventually. It's physics."
Vivi sat down in her chair, the one with the cushion, the one Johnny had sawed the legs shorter on without ever mentioning it, and the simple fact of that chair settled something in her chest. She picked up her fork.
"Eat," she said. "And after you eat, you're going to help me carry lemonade out to Dolores, because she's coming by with the trailer to look at the bay mare, and if you behave yourself I'll let you think you figured something out."
Casey's eyes went bright. "That's the most you've ever said to me at once."
"I'm feeling brave this morning."
"She's feeling brave this morning," Casey reported to Johnny, awed.
Johnny reached over without looking and squeezed the back of Vivi's neck, gentle as anything, his thumb and fingers wrapping clear around it. "Eat your pancakes, Casey."
Dolores arrived mid-morning in her rattling pickup, trailer hitched behind, and found Vivi waiting at the fence with a pitcher of lemonade sweating in the sun and Casey hovering two steps behind her like an unpaid shadow.
"Morning, girl." Dolores climbed out, squinted at Casey, then at Vivi. Then she laughed, low and delighted. "Lord. It's written all over both your faces. Something happened at breakfast."
"Nothing happened," Vivi said.
"Nothing happened," Casey echoed, reverent, "except she made pancakes and issued threats and looked me in the eye, which she has never done, and she said she's feeling brave, and Johnny just sat there drinking coffee like a man watching the weather come in."
Dolores took the lemonade and drank half the glass. "Vivi. Sweetheart. Did you finally answer his question?"
"I did not."
"She didn't have to," Casey said. "That's the beautiful part. I worked it out."
Vivi turned to stare at him. "You did not work anything out."
"I did, actually. Two weeks of observation. Field research." He counted on his fingers. "One, you're happy. Not polite happy, real happy, the kind where you hum. Two, Johnny hums. Three, every time I ask a question even near the subject, you go red to the ears, which means the subject is alive and well and ongoing. Conclusion: the math works just fine, ma'am. The math works great. I no longer require an answer, because the answer is all over your face every morning, and I'd bet the truck it's all over Johnny's too."
Dolores looked at Vivi over the rim of her glass. "He's not wrong."
"He is wrong," Vivi said, "because he hasn't worked out anything, he's just guessed, and his guess is rude and I'm not confirming it."
"That's confirming it," Casey and Dolores said at the same time.
Vivi pressed her cold glass against her own cheek, which helped exactly none, and Dolores cackled and went to look at the mare, and Casey carried on grinning like a man who had won a raffle.
The strange thing, the thing Vivi was still turning over that afternoon while she shelled peas on the porch, was how small the world kept trying to make her. Not Johnny. Not the ranch. The rest of it.
The feed store was the worst. She'd gone into town that Wednesday for yeast and fence staples, and the man behind the counter, a newcomer, some nephew of the Hartwells, looked her up and down and said, "Sweetheart, you in here by yourself? You want me to call your folks?"
"I'm twenty," she said.
"Sure you are, darlin'." He rang up her staples at a discount and patted her on the head, actually patted her, on the head, like a dog or a child, and she stood there holding the bag and could not think of a single thing to say until she was already in the truck.
She told Johnny about it that evening while he repaired a hinge on the barn door, his huge hands delicate around the hammer. He listened without stopping work, which was how he listened to most things.
"He patted your head."
"He patted my head."
"And the Hartwell nephew, that's Dale's sister's boy."
"I don't know who that is."
"Neither do I, but everybody in this county is somebody's somebody." He set the hammer down and looked at her. "You want me to say something?"
"No." She picked at a thread on her apron. "Maybe. I don't want to be the tiny wife who can't handle the feed store."
"You handled him."
"I let him pat me."
Johnny was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Come here."
She came, and he picked her up, one arm under her, easy as lifting a sack of feed, and set her on the hay bale by the wall so they were nearly eye to eye. Even nearly eye to eye required her to look up.
"Listen," he said. "First year I ran this place, I was twenty-five and my daddy three months in the ground, and the bank sent a man out to look me over. Talked to my foreman the whole visit. Shook my hand at the end and said, son, tell your father the paperwork looks good. I went home and I was so mad I couldn't eat."
Vivi put her small hand flat on his chest. His heart beat slow under her palm, the way it always did.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Went back the next month with the books and made him read every page while I stood there. Took an hour. He never did it again." Johnny tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear, his fingers huge and careful. "You don't owe strangers an argument, Vivi. But you don't owe them your manners either, not when they won't give you yours."
"So I should be rude."
"I didn't say rude. I said next time he talks down to you, you look at him the way you looked at Casey this morning." His mouth curved. "Casey told me about it later. He's still shaken."
She laughed, and the laugh loosened something, and she leaned forward and rested her forehead against his jaw, which was as far up as she could comfortably reach from the hay bale.
"He asked me once," she said, "if you were scary. First week I was here. He said everybody calls you scary and he wanted to know if I'd seen it."
"What'd you tell him?"
"I told him the scariest thing about you is the way you look at me at breakfast." She felt him go still. "Because he looks at me like I'm made of glass and you look at me like I'm made of gold, and glass breaks but gold holds its shape."
Johnny was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was rough at the edges. "You've been talking to Dolores."
"I've been talking to nobody. That one was mine." She pulled back to look at him, and the setting sun came through the barn door and lit the grey at his temples. "I'm twenty, Johnny. Everybody forgets. Casey forgets, the feed store man forgets, sometimes Dolores calls me girl like I'm twelve. But you never forget. That's the whole thing. That's the answer to Casey's question he's never going to get."
"Because?"
"Because the math isn't about inches." Her ears went hot, saying it, but she said it. "It's about being the only person in the world who was never once surprised that I'm grown."
Johnny breathed out slow. Then he gathered her off the bale and into his arms and just held her there in the dusty gold light, her feet clear off the ground, her cheek against his collarbone, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the barn was quiet except for the horses shifting in their stalls and Johnny's heart under her ear.
Saturday, Dolores brought the trailer back and stayed for lunch, and Casey stayed too, hovering, and it was during lunch that the whole thing finally came to a head in a way nobody planned.
Vivi had made spring rolls and a huge pot of pho, the broth simmered since dawn, and Dolores ate like a woman discovering a new country. Casey ate like a man who'd been told food was about to be outlawed.
"You made this," Dolores said. "From the bones up."
"Grandmother's recipe. Mostly. I changed the star anise because Johnny doesn't like it heavy."
"Johnny doesn't like star anise," Casey said. "The man is six and a half feet of pure beef and he doesn't like star anise."
"He has delicate sensibilities," Vivi said serenely, and Dolores laughed so hard she had to set down her spoon.
It was Casey, after, carrying his bowl to the sink, who finally circled back, because he was incapable of not. "So here's what I still don't get, Mrs. Reyes, and I swear it's my last question on the subject, cross my heart."
"Casey," Johnny said, a warning note in it.
"No, this one's safe. It's not about nights." He sat back down. "It's this. You came here from town. Nursing school, right? Your whole family's in town. You could've stayed there, married some guy your own size, done the thing everybody expected." He shrugged. "So why him? And don't say love, everybody says love, love explains nothing."
The table went quiet. Vivi looked at her bowl. She had asked herself this question in the first months, alone, in the dark, in the honest hours, and she had an answer now, one she'd never said out loud, and it felt suddenly like a dish she'd been cooking a long time and was finally ready to serve.
"When I was nineteen I spent every day at the hospital doing clinicals," she said. "And everybody talked to me like I was a decoration. The patients, the other students, the instructors. Small girl, sweet girl, pour the coffee, Vivi." She turned her bowl slowly on the table. "And then one day I walked into the feed store because I was lost, asked a man behind the counter for directions, and he stopped whatever he was doing. Stopped it completely. Looked at me like I was the only person in the room, and asked me a real question."
"What question?" Casey asked.
"He asked what I wanted. Not what I needed, not where I was headed. What I wanted." She looked up at Johnny, and Johnny was looking at his bowl, ears dark, a man enduring a compliment at gunpoint. "Nobody had ever asked me that. My parents asked. My school asked. The world just decided for me. And this enormous scary man standing there among the feed sacks looked at me and asked what I wanted, and waited for the answer like it mattered."
The clock ticked in the kitchen. Dolores had gone very still, in the way of a woman watching her own handiwork.
"So that's why," Vivi said. "Not because he's big. Because he's the first person who was ever careful with me without ever once assuming I was small inside."
Casey sat back. He opened his mouth. He closed it. He looked, for the first time in two weeks, entirely without words.
"That'll do it," Dolores said finally, and her voice was thicker than usual. She stood and carried her bowl to the sink and put a hand on Vivi's shoulder on the way, squeezing once, and said nothing more, which from Dolores was a standing ovation.
Casey cleared his throat twice. "Mrs. Reyes, I'm going to say one thing and then I'm going to go mow the west field and never speak of this again."
"Please," Vivi said.
"I spent a year thinking the question was how." He shook his head slowly. "It was never how. It was why, and I didn't even have the right question." He stood, picked up his cap, settled it on his head. "You're a lot bigger than you look, you know that?"
Vivi smiled, and it reached all the way to her eyes. "Everybody's starting to figure that out."
He went out. The screen door clapped shut behind him, and through the window they watched him walk toward the tractor, and halfway there he stopped, turned around, and hollered across the yard, "Johnny! She hums! I told you she hums!"
Johnny raised his coffee mug in acknowledgment, and Vivi buried her face in her hands, laughing, and Dolores drained the last of the broth from her bowl like a woman who intended to live another forty years and eat pho at this table the whole time.